High Dynamic Range Imaging?

I've recently seen some shots that used HDR and liked the results. Is this something I do when shooting, is it in post production, or is it in both? I've never done HDR imaging and would like to learn how to do this.

Thanks,

-Jon

Check this out...
https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=637594
There is a whole section on HDR here... it's under the RAW, post-production section.
It can be quite fun, enjoy!

And start here:

http://www.hdrlabs.com​/tutorials/index.html

Hello Jon,

Follow those links above, and if you look at the top of this page, you should see a sub-forum for HDR linked to to check out.

Additionally, if you look at the bottom of the page in the "Similar Threads" section, your title brought up some related threads you can check out.

In a nutshell, "true" HDR is accomplished when a photographer captures a scene where the range of tones and shadows go beyond the capabilities of the camera. The photog takes a number of images using varying exposures, typically by changing the shutter speed to preserve the aperture and the innate quality of a given ISO. Normally the greater number of exposures yields the best DR, although in practice a lot of people turn on the cameras Exposure Bracketing, which automatically takes three shots according to the range you specify.

After shooting, an HDR image is produced by a couple common ways: First, you can bring the set into HDR software which "tone-maps" the images together into one 32 bit file which you can then manipulate as you please and then bring the image into an editor such as photoshop as a 16 bit image to apply whatever other processing you wish.

The second way of processing is to load the set into an application such as Photosop which supports layers and layer masks, in which you place each image into its own layer with its own mask and then manually brush the needed parts of the image to "blend" the various tones together. In fact, Photoshop Bridge has an automated Blend tool (as well as an HDR tool) that actually loads a set of photos into layers, creates masks, and does a "first guess" at brushing in places --knid of a nice time-saver.

There is also an approach that we sometimes call "pseudo HDR" that can be useful especially if you shoot Raw (which has a greater dynamic range than does the compressed/converted jpeg). If you have a Raw file in a Raw processor, you can do several copies of that file that are adjusted separately to enhance highlights, shadows, midtones, etc and then load them as a set into either your HDR software or your layer/mask software and follow the same approach as the above. It may not be "true" HDR, but for those who don't have a bracketed set of an image it can make a real difference.

Hope this helps some!